Going Back to Brutalist Was the Plan for This Concrete Croatian Flat

The district of Novi Zagreb, located south of the Sava River in Zagreb, Croatia, teems with midcentury, socialist-era housing. Musician Josh Nalis, a producer of classical music concerts and festivals, grew up in such working-class developments, and once he anchored himself in the center of the Croatian capital, he vowed he’d never return to the sleepy residential area. "I’m shocked by how I changed my mind," he says.

When his mother died a few years ago, the old neighborhood tugged at him. She had resided in one of these buildings, and while he considered merely sprucing up her "practical and not very attractive" apartment, as he puts it, to ready it for the rental market, he ultimately decided to move back in. He had lived in that exact unit for a time, beginning in high school, and this was a chance to leave his own imprint on the space. Long compelled by the pared-back beauty of brutalism, Josh embarked on a renovation courtesy of Sofia, Bulgaria–based Simple Architecture.

The buildings in this stretch of Zagreb exhibit a pragmatic structural synergy. Constructed from prefabricated concrete blocks accented with sheets of corrugated steel, they exude a raw, industrial energy that Josh was keen to mirror in the interiors by revealing the space’s "original skeleton," as he puts it. "There’s no break from the concrete inside." In its pure, naked state, shorn of ornamentation and dominated by swaths of concrete, microcement, and glass, the apartment stays true to its 1960s roots, serving, Josh adds, as "a statement of the time."